


Impossible To Accept

by ohthewhomanity



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abuse, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon-Typical Violence, Carol has immortality angst, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Gen, I'm too ace to write non-platonic relationships today, It's darkest before the dawn, Parental Abuse, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science, Shuri has a dubiously healthy amount of optimism, Snap-related trauma, Spinal Injury, Stable Time Loops, Thanos gets his face bashed in, Time Travel, We all know Nebula has issues already I mean come on, a single f-bomb, blip-related trauma, incessant optimism, paraplegic, people trying to die for each other, rewriting Avengers: Endgame, self-indulgent fix-it fic, sped-up timeline, the snap didn't get Shuri this time around and that makes all the difference, way too many characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 22:11:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20881487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohthewhomanity/pseuds/ohthewhomanity
Summary: A reimagined endgame.Shuri glares at her with undampened fire. “I will not accept what is impossible to accept! Thanos did not win. There are seven and a half billion humans on Earth. And my brother is not dead!”





	Impossible To Accept

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [May I Ease Your Pain?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20884292) by [ohthewhomanity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohthewhomanity/pseuds/ohthewhomanity). 

“Have you been back to Earth, recently?” Talos asks as he and Carol Danvers sit together on the porch, watching the children play in the light of the setting twin suns. “How is that delightful little girl, who loved my daughter’s eyes?”

Carol smirks, but the amusement doesn’t entirely reach her eyes. “Monica’s not a little girl anymore. She’s all grown up and flying rockets. Or learning to, last time I checked. She must have graduated by now… I haven’t been to Earth in a while.”

Talos nods. “Defending the universe leaves you with little time to spend with your friends.”

“Yes...”

Carol hesitates, which isn’t like her. And then she says something that doesn’t seem very like her, either. But Talos has known “Captain Marvel” since before she knew herself. If she were to try to seem as invulnerable to him as the rest of the universe knows her to be, he wouldn’t believe it.

“I could have made time,” she says. “But I haven’t. I... Things just change so much, on Earth. The planet, the culture, the people… But I don’t.” She catches a glimpse of her reflection in the glass in her hand and sets it down on the table. “I don’t change,” she says again.

The retired Skrull commander nods again, slowly and sagely. “You fear to see your friends grow old.”

Carol frowns. “I don’t care if she – I don’t care if they’ve grown old. I care that I haven’t. I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t even know if I can die. I’m not eager to find out. But I don’t think I will any time soon.”

Talos looks out across the lawn again, where four small, green figures chase a ball and each other, while his daughter – now an adult, and to Carol’s eye the perfect mix of her parents – stands guard, laughing at their antics.

“I have had friends die,” he says. “And I have thought, many times, that I was about to die. But I have lived. Thanks to you, my people have lived, through many changes. I can’t tell you how to feel about change or lack of change, but I am glad for the changes we’ve been through. I am glad that we have a home. I am glad that my daughter, and my granddaughters, do not live in fear.

“And I am also glad for those things that do not change. Do you know, to this day, my daughter still never changes her eyes, because of what little Monica said? And you – I speak for all the Skrull when I say, we are very glad that you do not change. You are just as strong, just as good, just as inspiring as the day you first dedicated yourself to the protection of my people.

“We are grateful to you, Carol Danvers,” he concludes with a grandfatherly smile. “Never forget that.”

Carol opens her mouth to reply, but whatever words she had planned are interrupted by a scream.

She and Talos both leap to their feet – him more slowly than her, as his wounds have caught up to him in old age. Talos’s daughter is standing in the middle of the lawn, turning in a circle, three children rushing to gather around her.

“Selin!” she wails.

“What happened?” Talos barks, a hint of the stern commander mixing with the tone of a concerned father.

“She vanished!” A trembling green arm points at the spot. “There! Like dust in the air!”

Carol steps off the porch and strides onto the lawn, investigating the empty patch of grass.

“Mother!” one of the other children shrieks, and Carol whips her head around just in time to see a little green face fade into black flecks, and disappear.

Her mother grabs first at the empty air, and then at her remaining two children, clutching them close to her.

“What is happening?!” she wails, and Carol lifts into the air, her eyes and hands glowing with power as she looks for the threat. There are screams coming from all the surrounding houses, now – whatever this is, it’s happening all across the Skrull Homeland.

Her eyes land on the porch just as Talos’s eyes move away from his family and up to her. And while many humans would find those eyes disconcerting, Carol has grown familiar with them, and seen all kinds of emotions reflected in them.

She has never before seen these eyes express this particular combination of confusion and fear, shifting into despair as first Talos’s hands, and then his arms, and then his entire body disintegrate in the breeze.

Carol shouts in frustration, looking about wildly for some source of this disaster, anyone or anything that she can punch and destroy and end this, she has to end this –

– and then the pager in her pocket beeps.

She takes it out. It has remained silent for all these years, and now, at this very moment, Fury is calling for her aid.

Carol does not believe in coincidence.

“Earth,” she says aloud, practically spitting the word. “It _would_ be the center of this.”

She shoves the pager back into her pocket. The family on the ground, what’s left of it, is staring up at her. She has grown used to the sight of helpless people staring up at her, with fear and wonder and hope. She knows how to respond to their stares.

“Stay strong,” she says. “I will fix this.”

And then she turns, and in a blast of golden flame, Carol Danvers rockets into the sky.

* * *

Okoye cannot meet Shuri’s eyes, and that’s the most frightening thing that Shuri has seen all day. She does not waste time asking where her brother is. There are still bits of that gray, ash-like dust drifting through the air over a battlefield with half as many combatants on it than there were before. Those who remain are stumbling around with tears in their eyes or sitting in the grass with vacant expressions.

Shuri looks at them all – her people, what’s left of them, and the others, the heroes, foreigners, colonizers who came to her door for help mere hours before – and then she looks at Okoye again.

Okoye, who is bowing before her.

“My queen,” Okoye says – and Shuri grabs her by the shoulders, forces her upright.

“Never bow to me!” Shuri says, in a voice with the intensity of a hiss but the volume of a battle cry. “I am not your queen!”

Any other day, anyone manhandling Okoye in this way – even her princess – would result in the assailant at the very least nursing a sprained wrist. But nothing about this moment is like any other day, and so Okoye just gives Shuri a very sad look. “We must accept –” she begins.

Shuri glares at her with undampened fire. “I will not accept what is impossible to accept! Thanos did not win. There are seven and a half billion humans on Earth. And my brother is not dead!”

Once Shuri thought her brother had died. She had followed that path away from hope and down into despair, the path that so many around her at this moment are walking. She had been helpless, childlike, lost.

But then, T’Challa came back. With the help of his people, his family, he defied death, he returned home, he saved Wakanda, he saved the entire world.

How can Okoye expect her to accept, to even believe, such a thing now?

“I will not accept what is impossible to accept,” Shuri says again. “There must be a way to fix this.”

And despite the grief and weariness holding so many heads so low, eyes begin to turn towards her.

* * *

The wounded are gathered in the Golden City, and as soon as Shuri is certain that all immediate injuries are taken care of, she begins to pack her bags.

“What are you doing?!” Okoye demands, following Shuri around her lab.

“We have to consolidate resources,” Shuri replies, slowing down her brain enough for conversation though her body never stops moving, gathering, organizing. “The colonizers took too long to ask for help. If they had come to us sooner – but when have they ever come to help us, to truly work with us? If we are to work together, and save the universe, I must go to them.”

“Could you not do the work of saving the universe here at home?” says Okoye. “Your people need you.”

“Our people need what the world needs, and the world needs a scientific solution, and I can’t find that alone in my lab, Okoye, I can’t. Alone is not enough. One brain is not enough. I have to go to America.”

“And what of Wakanda? As its –” Okoye stops herself just in time. “As a member of the royal family_, _you have a duty to ensure your people are taken care of.”

Shuri stops in the middle of the glass floor, turning to face the door. There in the shadow of the doorway stands a man who has been silently following the two of them since the battle. A man who had known defeat before, but never of this magnitude. A man who, in the face of a world in which nothing makes sense anymore, has chosen to follow the child who scoffs at tradition, out of fragile hope that she would have the answers.

“Wakanda will be taken care of,” Shuri says. “M’baku –” The man in the doorway looks up. “You will take care of Wakanda.”

“What is left of it,” M’baku whispers.

“You will take care of Wakanda until its king returns,” says Shuri. “You love our land, our people. You will take care of it, and make sure that they understand what I need _you _to understand – that this is not the end.”

She steps forward, and though she has to tilt her head to look him in the eye, it feels like he is looking up at her.

“Do you understand?” she says.

M’baku nods.

“Wakanda awaits your return,” he says.

“Find Nakia,” says Shuri. “You know Wakanda. Nakia knows the world. Things will be uncertain everywhere, for a time, and Wakanda will need to work with the world.”

“If she is to be found, we will find her.”

Shuri looks to Okoye. She does not need to ask, and Okoye does not need to say.

She will follow her princess to America.

* * *

Some events remain the same any time a story is told.

Carol Danvers finds a ship lost in space. She carries Tony Stark home, where he collapses in despair. Nebula tells the remaining Avengers about a garden.

* * *

Okoye steps forward to join the team heading out to space. Not because she wants to go, though putting a spear through Thanos’s skull is an appealing prospect. But because taking a spot on the ship is the best way to stop Shuri from volunteering herself.

Steve Rogers holds up a hand.

“With all due respect,” he says, “Thanos is a bit out of your league. I could barely hold him off. If you go up against him, it’ll be an unnecessary sacrifice.”

Okoye’s gaze and voice are cold steel.

“Unnecessary?” she says. “Perhaps if you had allowed the android to decide whether or not his own sacrifice was necessary, the universe might still be full. Instead, you sent my people to die for him, and now here we are. I do not think you are qualified to decide what sacrifice is necessary.”

“It wasn’t Captain Rogers’s fault,” Shuri whispers to Okoye before she boards the ship. “If I had been faster at separating Vision from the Mind Stone –”

Okoye stops on the boarding ramp and puts a finger to Shuri’s chest, right over her heart.

“Never blame yourself for failing where powerful men stacked the odds against you,” she says. “Rise above, my princess.”

Shuri is so rarely at a loss for words, but here, all she can do is nod, and take a step backwards out of the way of the powering-up spaceship, as Okoye turns and steps through the closing door.

* * *

The stones are gone.

Nebula looks down at her father, and says he is not a liar. He has the audacity to act as though he loves her for it.

And then Thor swings Stormbreaker, and Thanos’s head rolls across the floor.

* * *

They return to Earth, and they fall apart. Shuri reasons, bargains, shouts – but it isn’t enough to keep the sorrowful heroes from walking away.

“Give me his research,” she finally says to Pepper Potts, because no one can get Tony Stark to talk to them, either. “I want full access to his lab. I need everything, no matter how irrelevant it may seem.”

Shuri makes the same demand of Bruce Banner, before he can wander off too far.

“What do you want my stuff for?” he says, still chafed by the _I’m sure you did your best_. “I thought you were the super genius girl.”

“I didn’t come here to be a lone genius in my lab,” Shuri scoffs. “Even if I _am _a genius. Why do you men always behave as if science is a solitary endeavor, as though we are not standing on the shoulders of everyone who failed before us? I don’t know what I need your ‘stuff’ for, but I need to collect it, all of it, everything. I need everything.”

* * *

A video appears online the next day. It’s played on every news channel in the world with enough staff left to operate. Some mock it, some praise it, some share it without comment. But the message is there, on every screen, all the same.

“The time for secrets and solitude is over,” Shuri says to the world. “Now is the time for work, for solutions, for hope, even, if you have any to spare. Whatever you know, whatever you have, come forward and give. We will face this together. And we will win.”

There it is, Carol Danvers thinks. There’s the spirit of the human race, right there.

* * *

“Fine,” Tony says to Pepper, “let the teen genius play with my toys, if it makes her shut up. It’s not like I’m ever gonna use them again.”

* * *

Emails start to flow in, and phone calls, and even letters once the postal service starts to put itself back together.

A lot of it is junk – people taking her plea as a joke, or telling her to go back to where she came from, or claiming that this apocalypse was the natural will of a wrathful god and therefore should be accepted.

But some of it is not junk.

Some of it is people saying they don’t have anything to contribute, but they’re so glad she’s trying. People who lost everything and are clinging to her words for dear life.

They send her their theses, their video essays, their observations about who disappeared and who did not, their data about the state of nature around them – including one rambling email about how it doesn’t make _sense _to just delete half of all life in the universe, if you delete the animal and plant life that was supposed to sustain that life as well.

This email is not particularly helpful, because Shuri is working to make sense of things rather than dwell on the things that don’t make sense, but it fuels her anger in a satisfying way, reaffirming her sense of injustice.

One day a beat-up Pinzgauer pulls up in front of the Avengers Compound, packed with files and computers and equipment. Jane Foster steps out and shakes Shuri’s hand.

“I don’t know if any of this will help,” she says, “but what am I supposed to do, just sit on the sidelines?”

* * *

Shuri is not the only survivor of the Battle of Wakanda hard at work.

While Shuri and her growing research army attempt to unlock the secrets of the universe, Natasha Romanoff steps up to lead what remains of the Avengers. Leadership is not a role she ever wanted, but the world can’t afford to wait for Stark or Rogers to decide to return to active duty. One thing’s for sure: she wants Clint at her side. But nobody seems to know where he is. Rhodes offers to search.

“What’s happening here is happening everywhere else,” Carol says. “I’ll do more good out there than here. But keep a line open, at all times, just in case.”

It’s logical. It doesn’t seem to anyone like she’s running away. She doesn’t do or say anything to make anyone think that she checked the missing person reports, or that she went to Louisiana and found only an empty house.

She does get a haircut. It’s a change that she’s able to control.

* * *

“It would’ve taken too long to transmit all of it,” Rocket says of the computer terminal Nebula just set down on Shuri’s lab table. “Data only travels at the speed of light. So, here we are, visiting Earth, instead of out saving the galaxy.”

“What is it, exactly?” says Shuri.

“Beats me. It’s from some geezer’s lab on Krylor. He wasn’t there to say whether he’d like us to take it. But you said you wanted everything, so…”

“Yes, thank you, Rocket.” Shuri is already at work finding the right connector cables to link the alien technology to her own, hardly acknowledging their presence in her lab anymore. Rocket shrugs and leaves. Nebula remains, watching Shuri fiddle, and pace, and finally grin with a hissed “Yes!” as the strange computer whirrs to life.

This isn’t the first time she’s stood here and watched Shuri work. Nebula has a tendency to fade into the background; it comes with not being overly fond of talking. But she is a good watcher, and a good listener, and so she watches Shuri as she types at computers, and as she paces while excitedly talking through a new idea with the scientists she’s collected, and as she looks up from every dead end with a set jaw and a renewed declaration that they will figure it out, they will bring back everyone they’ve lost, they must, they _will._

Nebula watches, and she wonders what kind of childhood Shuri had, to create someone so different from her in every way. But Shuri is always hard at work, and there’s never a good time to ask, and Nebula certainly isn’t going to ask Okoye. The Dora always looks at Nebula like she expects her to try to assassinate Shuri. Which is a fair assumption.

Nebula turns to leave the lab – but her limbs lock up. They’ve been acting up since her father tore her apart and she shoved herself back together, since her sister – but she isn’t thinking about Gamora, her brain leaps back from the thought. The point is, Nebula can’t remember a time when living _didn’t _hurt, but she thinks, she’s pretty sure, that it didn’t use to hurt this _much._

Despite herself, she lets out a groan of pain.

Shuri’s eyes shift towards her, darting up and down her body.

“Your cybernetic enhancements hurt you,” she says. An observation, not a question.

“It’s nothing,” says Nebula.

_I’m nothing, _hears Shuri. She sets down her tools, steps away from the alien computer.

“It’s incredible that you’re alive at all,” she says. “The interplay between your organic and mechanical components must be fascinating.”

Nebula snorts. “Fascinating” is not a word she’d ever use to describe herself.

“I could help,” says Shuri. “With some research, I could improve that interplay. I could ease your pain.”

Nebula means to say no. But what comes out instead is, “Why?”

Shuri knows very little about Nebula – just what Okoye told her after the mission to the garden. She doesn’t know, but she can guess, what kind of horrors Nebula has lived through. She doesn’t know, and she does not feel confident enough to guess, what to say to convince Nebula that she deserves a pain-free existence.

“I want to help,” Shuri says. Nebula stares at her blankly.

“I don’t need your help.”

Shuri continues to stare at the lab door after it closes behind Nebula.

* * *

Thor’s house in New Asgard always has a closed door. Valkyrie knocks on it. Well, it starts out as a knock. If the fifth knock smashes the door open, well, that’s just the fault of shoddy workmanship, now isn’t it?

“Alright, you’ve had your wallow,” she says, ignoring Korg’s protests as she unplugs the video game console. “Time to be king again.”

Thor just stares at her. He’s drunk. He shouldn’t be able to get drunk off this weak milk they make here on Earth, but drunk is what he wants to be, and so drunk he is. Valkyrie remembers what that was like.

It doesn’t bother her that he’s drunk. Or that he’s fat. Or that his beard is encroaching on his chest.

What bothers her is that he’s a _bloody hypocrite._

“Get up,” she says.

“Why?” says Thor.

“Because that’s what heroes do?”

Again, he just stares at her, but this time she has to admit she deserves it.

“Okay, look, heroic pep talks are much more your thing than mine,” she says. “But where you are right now? I’ve been there. _I’ve been there. _And all I wanted to do was stay there, but you didn’t let me, you told me I had a duty to the people of Asgard, and if anyone has that, it’s you. So if I have to cut you off, or drag you to therapy, or whatever it is I need to do to get you back on your feet, I’m going to do it. My question for you is, how hard are you going to make it for me?”

Thor stares at her for a few more seconds. Then he laughs. He laughs like he hasn’t laughed since before his brother died.

“Alright, let’s do it,” he says, “if only to see if it’s _possible _to find a human therapist who can handle all of this.” He gestures vaguely at himself and the room around him.

“They’re working overtime these days,” says Valkyrie.

* * *

“What do you think?” Banner asks, stooping to avoid bumping his head against the ceiling of the lab.

“With complete honesty?” says Shuri, looking up at this new combination of man and Hulk. “You’ve done your best.”

* * *

It’s difficult to separate the destruction that came from the snap from the destruction that was already there. Thanos’s fingerprints are on a lot of it anyway.

Carol hovers above the surface of Zen-Whoberi. From the records she’s found and the legends she’s heard in this part of the galaxy, it was one of the worlds Thanos decimated in the name of eliminating overpopulation, long before he held even one of the Infinity Stones.

Now, Zen-Whoberi is empty. It’s clearly been empty for a long time. Its last daughter is dead on Vormir, her father’s lies about the fate of her people still fresh in her cooling ears.

No, not lies. Thanos was not a liar.

But this is a planet where you truthfully find no starving children: a planet with no children at all.

* * *

Shuri’s mother used to scold her for staying up too late in the lab. Now there’s no one to scold her, and every reason to keep working, because moments spent sleeping are moments not spent figuring out how to restore the universe. It’s been months since the snap – four or five, Shuri forgets to keep track of the transition between one day and the next sometimes – and they need to find a solution soon, before the world gives up again.

She sets down her tools and rubs her hands over her eyes, yawning. As she lowers them again, she realizes she’s not alone in the lab. Nebula’s there. Watching. Shuri should find her silent presence startling – she’s an alien, and still by any definition a stranger – but she doesn’t.

“Have you found anything new?” Shuri asks.

“No.”

“When did you get back?”

“This morning.”

“Uh-huh. And how long have you been standing there?”

Nebula doesn’t reply.

Shuri stifles another yawn. “Do you drink coffee?”

Nebula just tilts her head to the side in something that’s neither a yes nor a no. Shuri fetches two mugs regardless, not intending to be offended if Nebula leaves hers undrunk. She pulls some chairs over to the window – the view from this lab is not as stunning as her view of the vibranium mines back home, but the night sky will have to do.

They sit, Shuri sipping her coffee and Nebula staring at hers. Shuri allows her brain to take a break from the day’s high-stakes puzzles, studying the constellations above and calculating the differences between this view and the view from home, in another hemisphere.

What did the stars look like from another planet? Could you tell, from there, which distant light was Earth?

“Tell me about your brother.”

Nebula’s low voice surprises Shuri out of her train of thought. Of course she’s mentioned T’Challa in Nebula’s earshot, multiple times. But this is the first time Nebula has asked her anything – aside from that single _why._

So Shuri tells her. She talks about her brother the King, and their childhood in Wakanda, and the battles they’ve fought together, and the jokes they’ve shared. All the while, she speaks of him in the present tense, and Nebula tries to understand how she can do that.

Nebula keeps listening, and so Shuri keeps talking, about things she hasn’t spoken of or even thought much about in months, she’s been so busy. She talks about her parents, about the Wakandan Outreach Center, about Killmonger, about the Jabari. About the terrorist who killed her father.

“Did you kill him?” Nebula asks.

Shuri shakes her head.

“Didn’t you want to?”

Shuri thinks about it. “Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you? He killed your father. He hurt you, and your brother.”

“Do you go around killing the people who hurt you?”

“Yes.”

Several different things cross Shuri’s mind, but in a moment of wisdom she says none of them, instead turning her gaze to the stars again.

“What do you do?” Nebula asks. “When you don’t go around hurting the people who hurt you.”

“I make things,” says Shuri. “I fix things, I upgrade them. Things that will keep anyone else from being hurt as I was.”

She’d teased and laughed when she’d given her brother his new suit – one that would be always on him, one with a helmet that could appear with a thought, one that was able to absorb the energy of a bomb. She hadn’t told him, but she assumed that he knew, that she had begun to design it the hour after she learned of her father’s death.

“Could you upgrade me?” Nebula says, again interrupting Shuri’s thoughts. “Or just, fix things, a little.”

“Would you like me to?”

Nebula nods.

* * *

Shuri is two for two on fixing broken white boys, but she’s never tried to fix a broken blue girl before. The cybernetics that make up the majority of Nebula’s body are unfamiliar to her, but understandable – much like the human research and alien computers she’s been working on these past five months – much like the person that these cybernetics contain.

For all her confidence and optimism, Shuri doesn’t think that she can fix all that has been done to Nebula. A lot of it, Nebula will have to fix for herself, if it can be fixed.

But Shuri finds moments, moments when she needs a break from the all-important work, moments when she should be asleep but can’t get any rest, to work on Nebula’s machinery. Sometimes they sit in silence while she does so. Other times, Nebula asks for more stories of Shuri’s life on Earth. Slowly, as Shuri tinkers and scans and comes to understand the details of Nebula’s mechanical features, she learns to understand as well the details within Nebula’s silence and stillness, the small changes in posture and tone that convey a different emotion, the patterns of questions that tell her what part of her stories truly interest this alien and yet so familiar woman.

And then one night, Shuri says, “Tell me about your sister.”

And Nebula talks until her throat is hoarse, the sun is rising, and salty water is dripping down blue and brown cheeks alike.

Behind her, Shuri hears Banner’s footsteps in the hall, and the lights in the next room switch on, where Jane Foster has been camping out. Shuri quickly wipes her face and sets her tools aside.

“Does that feel any better?” she says, making a general sort of gesture at Nebula’s mechanical body.

Nebula reaches up to put her hand around Shuri’s. Shuri holds very, very still.

“Yes,” says Nebula, “it does.”

* * *

Finally, a breakthrough, from a most unexpected source: a young woman in a white containment suit appears at the center of the lab, apparently out of thin air.

“I finally found his van,” Ava Starr says. “It’s parked outside. Full of Hank Pym’s tech. Not sure if it’ll help, but if you need a quantum tunnel for some reason…”

Shuri has no idea if a quantum tunnel will help, but she’s never used one before, so she really can’t resist turning it on.

And so Scott Lang tumbles out of the Quantum Realm and crash-lands on the Avengers’ front lawn.

* * *

Five months are not quite as dramatic as five years. But the point still stands. And so after the _who the hell are you_s and the _where the hell am I_s and the _for god’s sake where’s my daughter let me call my daughter_s are finished, the brilliant minds gathered around the Avengers Compound kitchen table recognize the possibility in front of them.

They’ve spent all this time trying to figure out the Infinity Stones, their nature, how to replicate their power and undo their effects. But what if they could get the stones back?

What if they could _go_ back?

“But is it possible?” Banner says for the third time, as everyone holds their breath and waits for a response from the speaker phone.

Tony Stark is quiet for a long time.

“…don’t do it,” he finally says. “Don’t mess with time. Teen genius, I know you’re listening. Please. I – She’s pregnant. I can’t lose this. Not now.”

Shuri leans across the table. “Your family will not come to harm, Mr. Stark,” she says, and then she hangs up.

* * *

Natasha puts out a call to arms.

Steve Rogers is the first to respond, trusting that his eternal strength and youth will hide how much the last half-year of grief has aged him.

Thor doesn’t bother trying to hide any of it. He and Valkyrie appear on the front lawn, and Banner comes out to greet them. Thor and Banner laugh at each other, at their transformations, at the different and yet oddly similar ways their internal struggles have become externalized.

Valkyrie laughs at them both and heads inside. She’s heard that Thor’s ex is around, and she wants to milk Jane for embarrassing stories which she may or may not use to blackmail her king, depending on her mood.

Natasha retrieves Clint herself, on a tip from Rhodes. She finds him kneeling in a pool of blood, waxing lyrical about who deserves to live or die. In another life, this assassination would have been the first of many – but the Black Widow knows better than anyone how even one red spill can darken your ledger.

“We can get them back,” she tells him, and also, “You can come back from this.”

It’s unclear whether he believes her, but regardless, he follows her home.

* * *

A baseball glove in Clint’s shaking hands proves the time machine’s success. They have the means. What they need now is a plan of attack. Where – or more precisely, when – do they go to get the stones?

“We have to be careful,” says Scott. “How many trips can we do? We only have –”

“We have as many Pym Particles as we need,” Shuri says. Ava had found Hank Pym’s miniaturized lab, and his research wasn’t nearly as securely encoded as he had thought, at least not to Shuri. “But you’re right. There’s no reason to be wasteful. We need precise locations and times, and the person who goes there must be the right one for the job.”

“Right,” says Steve. “The time for ego is done. Let’s get this right the first time.”

“And get them back to the past the first time, too,” says Jane. “What?” she continues to the blank stares around the room. “It goes without saying that we need to put them back, right? To avoid creating paradoxes or alternate universes or whatever sci-fi consequences the universe has in store?”

Evidently it did not, in fact, go without saying. Some in the room – and we will not disgrace their reputations by recording their names – were under the impression that they might keep the stones and use them. For good. For protection. For insurance.

Nebula slams a fist down onto the table, cutting the conversation short.

“And the next Thanos will use them, too,” she says. “If they exist, they will be used. We must put them back. Put them back and let them die with my father.”

Nobody argues with her. And so it is decided: the stones must be taken as surreptitiously as possible, and returned just as so.

As for where and when to get them from – the heroes around the room speak up, and share their stories of encounters with the Infinity Stones, and soon they have a precise list.

* * *

For the most part, everyone obeys Steve’s call for the end of ego, and the discussion of who should go where is a civil one.

There is one significant argument.

“You’re not going,” says Shuri.

Nebula stares at her from the other side of the holographic screen they’ve been taking notes on. “What?”

“Time travel is out of the question for you.” And maybe it would have been more tactful to say this while _not _in the same room as all the other Avengers, but Shuri’s mind is racing and her mouth is moving and her conscience hasn’t yet caught up with her concern, and so the next words out of her mouth, in front of everyone, are, “You’ll be a danger to the mission, and to yourself, don’t you realize?”

Nebula’s fingers twitch, and it’s a testament to those quiet nights spent talking and listening in the lab that they do no more than that, and any weapons she might have on her remain stashed away.

“You have no say in what I do,” she says.

Shuri reaches up and swipes away the notes on the screen, replacing them with one of the many scans she performed on Nebula’s cybernetics while working to ease her pain.

“Your implants are designed to interface with Thanos’s network,” Shuri says. “You must know this. If you go back in time, to any time when he is alive, who’s to say he won’t be able to access you, use you, learn what you know?”

“That won’t happen!”

“It’s a possibility we can’t ignore!”

“That’s enough!” Steve says, but they ignore him.

“I will be a part of this!” says Nebula. “It’s my decision to make!”

“No! I have not spent all this time repairing you so that you could go and have your father rip you to shreds again!”

And Nebula freezes, and Shuri does too, because it hits her that for all that she’s learned about Nebula, Nebula never once actually told her that her father’s torture was the source of her pain. It was a guess, the conclusion of a brain much too adept at putting together puzzle pieces.

It was not hers to know, and it was certainly not hers to say.

And Nebula knows, from the way that everyone in the room is looking at her, that if she tries to go back in time, they will all stand in her way.

Once she would have taken that as a challenge and let the room fill with their blood.

Now, she settles for upending a table and storming out of the room, leaving an awkward silence and a thoroughly mortified Wakandan princess in her wake.

* * *

For Shuri and the other scientists monitoring the quantum tunnel, only a few seconds will pass.

For those in the white jumpsuits preparing to embark, it will be longer.

* * *

Valkyrie knows exactly where she will find the Space Stone. She’s known for a long time. She doesn’t tell anyone how she knows, and she maintains a level of confident caginess about exactly when she plans to get it from. But Thor vouches for her trustworthiness, and so she’s put to the task.

She appears in a dark, quiet corner of the Grandmaster’s spaceship. Jumping through the quantum realm and onto a moving spaceship is no easy feat, so she chooses the one moment where she knows exactly where the refugees of Asgard will be, risky though it is. At this moment, the ship has slowed to a planetary approach speed near Mars. The intention is to land safely on Earth. They have mere minutes before anyone realizes that they won’t make it there.

Footsteps in the corridor approach her. Two people are talking, chatting in a friendlier way than they ever expected to. Certainly they will never call each other “friend,” she's sure of that. But they are much more amicable now than they had been on Sakaar.

Valkyrie steps into the light right in front of them.

“Don’t say anything,” she says, just like she remembers hearing it all those months ago, and she herself is the only one who can get away with telling Valkyrie to be silent.

No one can get away with saying that to Loki. “I’m sorry, what –” he says.

“This will make sense eventually,” Valkyrie from the future says. “For now, you’re out of time. Thanos will be here in minutes. I need the tesseract. Yes, Loki, I know you have it. I’ll return it in literally three seconds. And yeah, in case it wasn’t obvious, I’m from the future, so do me a favor and don’t tell anyone you saw me, okay?”

Loki hesitates. Valkyrie from the past glares at him. “Do as she says.”

So Loki, slowly, reluctantly, places the glowing blue cube in Valkyrie’s hand.

“Three seconds,” he says. “I’m counting on it.”

“And I’m counting on you to pull off the biggest trick of your life,” she replies, lifting her wrist – but before she zaps away, she looks at her past self again.

“The next to last escape pod in the row will still work,” she says. “You’ll save exactly as many lives as you can, I promise.”

And then she presses the button, and she disappears.

* * *

Everyone knows where the Time Stone has been.

They choose a day when the few people outdoors won’t find it odd to see a Hulk climbing around and reluctantly smashing – and Thor and Banner exit the quantum realm on a rubble-strewn New York City street in 2012.

The Ancient One is understandably amused that they come to her looking for Dr. Strange, and understandably unwilling to hand over what she has sworn to protect. Banner and Thor try appealing to her better nature, which doesn’t work, and threatening her, which not only doesn’t work but also gets their souls ejected from their bodies.

Thor looks down at his own crumpled form on the Sanctum Santorum rooftop with frustration.

“You can trust us to bring it back!” he insists. “You know those heroes out there defending the city at this very moment? We’re the same heroes!”

“Are you?” the Ancient One says, and Thor looks down at his body again.

“No, we’re not,” says Banner. “We’re better than we were then, or now, or however we’re supposed to talk about it. We’re up against something bigger than what we were before. And despite everything, somehow, we have a larger team than before. We’re going to survive this, and we’ll bring the stone back. It’ll be like it never left. I promise.”

“I can’t risk reality on a promise,” says the Ancient One. “It’s the duty of the Sorcerer Supreme to protect the Time Stone.”

“Then why the hell did Strange give it away?!” says Banner.

And that one question changes everything. That one question, about Strange’s actions to bring about the one victorious outcome in fourteen million six hundred and five possible futures. Indeed, he must have had a reason.

So the Ancient One returns Thor and Banner to their bodies, and hands over the stone, solemnly, nervously.

Banner reaches for his wrist.

“No, wait,” says Thor. He holds out his hand towards the horizon.

A few seconds later, Mjolnir soars across the city blocks and into his hand.

Thor grins, a wave of relief knocking one more layer of pain off his shoulders. “I’m still worthy!” he says, tossing the hammer in his hand.

“You’re going to bring that back too, right?” says Banner.

“Yes, sure, of course,” says Thor. “But surely my past self can do without it for a while. He doesn’t have _nearly _as many problems yet.”

* * *

Three years later, another time-traveling duo arrive in New York.

There had been a bit more debate about where and when to find the Mind Stone – not because its location was unknown, but because of who had it, and when it might be somewhere accessible. They didn’t have the time or resources to snatch it out of Loki’s scepter, or to break into a Hydra base.

But the lab in Avengers Tower? Steve Rogers knows enough about Stark’s security systems to talk Ant-Man through the heist.

“Not gonna lie,” Scott says over their headsets as he makes his way through the vents, “I thought joining the Avengers would mean a lot less breaking into the good guys’ bases.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, things are about to get pretty morally ambiguous here in 2015,” Steve replies. “We can’t really blame anyone but ourselves for Ultron. But that stone is also why we had Vision, for a while. They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, but…”

“…but sometimes looking back on the stuff you’ve done just makes it harder to know what’s right. Yeah. I get that.”

Scott returns to full size just long enough to grab the Mind Stone out of its container, trusting that the klaxons he sets off by doing so will ultimately be deemed a false alarm.

* * *

Natasha, Clint, Okoye, and Rhodes travel together to Morag and then split off into two groups. It’s not an ideal set-up, but anyone who had been to space more than twice had other missions to go on. And from what Nebula told them of the Power and Soul stones – before the argument; she hasn’t spoken to anyone since – it seems like they’d be easy to find.

It’s certainly easy to find 2014 Star-Lord as he dances across the darkened landscape. It’s even easier for Okoye to leave him unconscious on the ground, and for Rhodes to get his hands on the Power Stone.

Natasha and Clint, on their way to Vormir, have no idea how much more difficult a time they’re about to have.

* * *

“In order to take the stone, you must lose that which you love. An everlasting exchange. A soul for a soul,” Red Skull says.

“If we don’t get that stone, billions of people stay dead,” Natasha says.

“Then I guess we both know who it’s gotta be,” Clint says.

But they don’t, not really. They never do. They’ve always seen the best in each other, and now more than ever the worst in themselves. And while both carry guilt, neither truly believes that the other has something to repay. They never have.

They lie. They fight. They throw themselves over the cliff, each trying to save the other’s life as much as they themselves are trying to die.

It could have been either of them, really. There’s nothing about this moment that renders them distinct from each other. Nothing about this moment that makes sense, or is fair, or is right.

But there are ways that are less wrong.

And all that Natasha can think to do to make all of this less wrong, to make something out of how she now sits in the pool with the Soul Stone in her hands, is to ensure that Clint Barton’s family is taken care of for the rest of time.

* * *

Rocket has always wanted to rob the Collector, so really, everything about sneaking into his tower and grabbing the Reality Stone before Thanos gets there seems perfect.

Everything except how he doesn’t get there early enough.

He snarls a constant stream of obscenities as he scratches and bites at Thanos’s hand, trying to break free from the grip around his neck, trying to snatch back the time-travel device that now rests in the other massive hand, undergoing careful study.

“You came from the future,” Thanos concludes. “You thought to claim the Reality Stone before I could do so. This tells me that I succeed, and that stubborn fools will refuse to accept my success.”

“You’re outta your mind,” says Rocket.

Infuriatingly, Thanos smiles. “The doomed do tend to tell me so.”

Rocket is thrown inside a display case, his head slamming against the opposite wall as the front is locked. He sits up in a daze, only able to watch as Thanos holds up the Reality Stone.

“Time must continue as it would if I hadn’t known,” he says. “But also, the futile attempts of my enemies to avert the inevitable must be stopped. How fortunate to now hold in my hand the power to create alternate universes.”

“No,” Rocket gasps, but there’s nothing he can do.

Thanos opens a pathway through the universe with the Space Stone, calling one of his Black Order to him. Proxima Midnight kneels before Thanos.

“You have the chance to prove that you are more than your recent failure,” Thanos says.

The Reality Stone glows, and Proxima shrinks, and sprouts fur, and now there is another Rocket there.

In the next moment, there is another Reality Stone, identical in every way to the original. Thanos hands it to the false Rocket, along with the quantum device.

A new Proxima Midnight appears, as well, and the Space Stone sends her back to Earth, to die in the Battle of Wakanda.

And then – as if all of this was not enough – there is a new Thanos, who takes the original stone in his hand and walks away.

“He will not remember this,” the original Thanos says. “He has a disobedient daughter to confront. I, now, have a war to prepare for.”

“I will not fail you, father,” the false Rocket says. He presses the button on his wrist and vanishes. And soon Rocket is alone with his failure, in a building on a planet which is about to be bombed lifeless, in a universe which he knows is doomed.

Rocket’s forehead rests against the clear front of the display case. “I’m sorry, Groot,” he says.

* * *

Ten time-travelers set out on this mission.

Seconds later, nine return, with six stones.

Most of them stare at the spot where Clint should be. Shuri hardly glances at it.

“There’s a way to bring him back,” she says, dismissing Natasha’s explanation, dismissing Red Skull’s statements and how Thanos threw his own daughter into the pit, dismissing everything that even hints at failure. “Look at what we’ve done, look at what was supposed to be impossible. We have the Infinity Stones. It’s time to use them.”

Some nod, because they believe her optimism. Some nod, not because they believe, but because they don’t want to let Clint’s death be in vain, or because they don’t want to waste any more time.

Nobody in the room knows Rocket well enough to expect him to nod, or to say anything.

Nobody in the room thinks it strange that he quietly hands over the Reality Stone, or that he stays near the quantum tunnel while everyone else leaves.

* * *

“The radiation’s mostly gamma,” says Banner. “It’s like I was made for this.”

Shuri nods. “Remember our promise. We’re bringing back who we lost, restoring the universe to the way it should be. We’re not getting rid of anyone or anything else.”

Watching Banner put on the gauntlet is both exhilarating and terrifying. He sacrifices his arm.

But he snaps.

* * *

With everyone else’s attention drawn to the united Infinity Stones, there’s no one in the lab to prevent the creature who is not Rocket from pressing a few important buttons.

“What are you doing?”

Nebula is standing in the doorway.

Not-Rocket sneers at her. “You have betrayed our father. You will be punished.”

The quantum tunnel whirs to life.

Nebula’s eyes widen. She draws her dagger, running at the impostor with a cry.

* * *

“Guys,” says Scott, “I think it worked.”

And then the missiles hit, and the Avengers Compound is reduced to rubble.

* * *

For a moment, Shuri thinks Okoye has tackled her to the ground. Then she opens her eyes and sees Valkyrie looking down at her. Valkyrie, who shoved both Shuri and Jane beneath her as the wall – which is now pressed against her back – came down on top of them.

“Move!” Valkyrie hisses, and the girls do so, scrambling out of harm’s way and reaching their hands out to help Valkyrie pull herself free.

The rest of their science team are scattered around them, coughing and shouting for help. Jane hurriedly rips some fabric off Erik Selvig’s sleeve and presses it to the gash on his forehead. Ava crawls straight through a foot of rebar before collapsing, solid again and gasping for breath.

In Shuri’s headset, she hears Rhodes calling for help – he and Banner are drowning. Scott is rushing to their aid.

She pulls her attention away from the voices in her ear and back to the here and now, and she helps another scientist free from the rubble.

* * *

“Romanoff!”

Natasha takes Okoye’s hand, and Okoye pulls her to her feet. They’re both bruised, but upright.

“What has happened?” Okoye looks up at the hole they fell through. “What happened to Shuri, did you see?”

“I don’t know,” Natasha says. “To both questions.”

A stray light hanging in the darkness glints off something metal on the ground. The gauntlet, six stones shining in their sockets.

Natasha picks it up.

Something snarls in the darkness, and the two women – fighters from very different wars – realize at once that they are not alone down here.

Okoye catches sight of the Outriders first.

“Run,” she gasps. “Run!”

* * *

At the edge of the rubble, Thanos sits, waiting.

Across the wastes, Thor watches him. Steve steps up to the God of Thunder’s side, shield in hand.

“Let’s kill him properly this time,” says Thor, lifting both Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.

Thanos lets them approach.

“You could not live with your own failure,” he says, as though anyone cares what he has to say. “Where did that bring you? Back to me. I thought by eliminating half of life, the other half would thrive, but you have shown me that's impossible. As long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be.”

“That’s your problem,” says Steve.

And so the final battle begins.

* * *

Okoye and Natasha race through the remains of the compound, alternately having each other’s back, slicing and stabbing and punching at the monsters who get close enough to strike.

Finally, they climb a ladder and reach a point where none seem to pursue them anymore, and they take a moment to catch their breath.

“What do we do now?” Okoye wonders aloud.

An anthropomorphic raccoon steps into the light. “Give me the gauntlet,” it says.

“Rocket?” says Natasha. “Have you found the others yet?”

“Give me the gauntlet, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“_Don’t trust him!_”

A dagger flies out of the darkness, sticking itself in Rocket’s abdomen.

“It’s not Rocket!” Nebula continues as she runs into view.

“Rocket” snarls, and transforms – and Proxima Midnight draws her three-pronged spear.

Nebula tackles her, and they both tumble over the edge, falling deeper into the wreckage, quickly out of sight and sound once again.

“What fresh hell is going on now?!” Okoye demands.

* * *

The fight against Thanos might have gone better with the addition of a big man in a suit of armor. As it is, Mjolnir is knocked away, and then Steve is knocked away, and Thor soon after him.

Steve struggles to get up. His eyes turn to the sky – Thanos’s army is descending from the massive ship above them. But if this is the last stand, he sure as hell isn’t going to take it lying down.

“Hey, Cap, do you read me?” says a voice in his ear, blurred with static. “Cap, it’s Sam… On your left.”

Steve looks to his left, and he sees the portal, and the figures stepping through – silhouettes at first, with the African daylight at their backs.

He makes eye contact with T’Challa, who nods at him.

The king of Wakanda is flanked on either side by M’baku and Nakia – two who have served their country, and the world, as much as he ever did.

And behind them, the armies of Wakanda stand at the ready, Sam swooping down over them on falcon wings.

And this portal is the first of many. On the other side of the wreckage, Shuri climbs onto a large chunk of debris to see better.

She sees the heroes who fell on Titan – Strange, Mantis, Drax, Quill, and Parker.

She sees the heroes who fell in Wakanda – Barnes, Groot, Maximoff.

She sees the Asgardians. The rebel gladiators of Sakaar. Hope Van Dyne. Sorcerers from all over the world, following their Supreme’s instructions.

And then come even more armies, defenders of all species and from all walks of life who had nothing to do with the Avengers to this point. Flying vessels of all kinds emerge from the portals – from a formation of American Air Force fighter planes, to spaceships the likes of which Earth has never seen. The people of the universe arrive to avenge themselves on Thanos.

Giant-Man explodes out of the rubble, Banner and Rhodes held safely in Scott’s massive hand.

A winged horse lands at Valkyrie’s side, and she mounts it eagerly.

“Get the others to safety,” she says as they take off to join the fight.

Shuri and Jane look at each other.

Jane nods. “I got this. Go.”

And as Jane leads the other scientists away from the battle, Shuri runs right back into it.

* * *

It’s an all-out war now. Thanos’s forces versus the rest of the universe. On the ground and in the air, heroes fight side by side as never before, cheer each other on as never before, save each other’s lives as never before.

Thor takes on three titan-like Sakaaran soldiers at once, slicing two of their heads off with Stormbreaker and parrying the strike of the third.

As a result, he does not see the fourth, preparing to swing its massive club at his back.

But then a snake darts along the ground, sliding between Thor’s feet before leaping up from the ground, transforming –

– and Loki stabs the fourth soldier through the neck, shoves it aside, and grins at his brother.

Thor gapes.

“Please don’t throw anything at me,” Loki says. “You have many more important targets right now.”

“But how – But Thanos –”

Loki laughs. “Didn’t I tell him he would never be a god? My best performance, if I do say so myself. Remind me not to thank Valkyrie for the warning; she doesn’t deserve the satisfaction.

“You might want to duck,” he adds, and Thor does so.

One of Thanos’s monsters barely misses the top of his head as it falls, already dead from the fire of one of the Air Force planes darting and dodging around the larger spaceships above.

At the head of their formation, Captain Monica “Marvel” Rambeau whoops with exhilaration as her team takes out a Chitauri Leviathan, sending it burning to the ground.

* * *

“Steve, are you there?” Natasha has her fingers pressed to her earpiece, her other arm clinging tightly to the gauntlet as she dodges through the fray. Okoye strikes at any extraterrestrial threat who comes too close, with one eye constantly searching the crowd for Shuri or T’Challa.

“Nat, where are you?”

“I have the gauntlet. We can’t let them take it back.”

“Get it as far away from here as possible!” Steve orders.

“No, the stones have to go back where they came from!” Banner chimes in.

“But we don’t have a time machine anymore,” says Rhodes.

But they do – there’s still the smaller quantum tunnel in Scott’s van. Valkyrie spots it, giving Scott and Hope the directions they need.

But Thanos has eyes on the gauntlet as well, and orders for his forces: _get it at any cost_.

* * *

“Play keep-away!” Natasha shouts, passing the gauntlet to Okoye just before a pack of Outriders force them apart. It’s not a phrase the Wakandan warrior understands, but she gets the gist, racing up a hill of debris.

“Okoye!” shouts a voice that makes her heart leap with hope. “Give it to me!”

“Wakanda forever!” Okoye cries, throwing the gauntlet to T’Challa, whose suit allows him to race unharmed through the battle, turning enemy fire into kinetic explosions.

His progress is only stopped by the appearance of Thanos himself – but then Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, steps between them.

“You took everything from me,” she says.

Thanos raises his eyebrows. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“You will.”

It’s enough to buy T’Challa enough time to gain a few more yards. Thanos’s forces have realized that shooting him does nothing but blow up in their faces, so instead they rush him, crushing him with their mass –

– and a shot of webbing snatches the gauntlet out of T’Challa’s hands and into the air. Peter Parker catches the Infinity Stones and swings away.

* * *

Wanda is strong. Too strong. And Thanos knows it.

He orders the massive gunship to fire down on the battlefield, on his own troops. Wanda has to let him go to protect herself. Every other magic-user on the field turns their strength as well towards protecting the heroes around them from the fire raining from above.

Peter has no magical shield to hide beneath, and he looks up in terror –

“Hang on, kid, we’ve got you!”

– and metal hands grab his shoulders, and he’s flying, dodging around the bombs and blasts, carried through the air by two metal suits.

“Peter, you okay?” a voice snaps from the suit on his left.

“Mr. Stark?!”

“Sorry I’m not actually there this time,” says the voice from the remotely-piloted Iron Man suit. “Things are a bit busy on the home front. Important question for you – how do you like the idea of being a godfather?”

“A what?!? Y-You want me to be –”

“Not the best time, Tony!” Pepper’s voice comes from the suit on the right, and Peter has to laugh at the image of the two of them bickering over the controls a hopefully-safe distance away from the battle itself.

They swerve downward to avoid an explosion, and Valkyrie’s steed comes up to meet them, and Peter’s life somehow gets a little bit stranger now that he is riding on the back of a winged horse.

And then something hits them, and he’s no longer on the back of the horse, but falling towards the very dangerous ground.

All of a sudden, the hailstorm of bombs stops. The gunship turns its cannons on the sky, on the thing – the person – that just entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

Carol Danvers smashes through Thanos’s gunship, bringing it down in one strike. The forces of the universe cheer.

Peter hits the ground and rolls, desperately gripping the gauntlet with both arms. He finally comes to a stop near someone’s feet.

A girl his age is looking down at him with a curious expression.

“I had thought the Spider-Man would be older,” she says. “This would explain the heightened agility. And the high rate of after-three-p.m. crimefighting.”

“I-I’m not that young!”

“Oh, I’m not judging you for your age.” Shuri extends a hand, helping him to his feet. “If it seemed like I was, I apologize. I know how it is. When this is over, we should meet in my lab. I have some ideas about how to upgrade your suit. Though I haven’t yet figured out how you’ve made it so effectively stick to any surface.”

“That’s not the suit, that’s…” Peter shakes his head. “What’s your name again?”

“I’m Shuri.”

“Shuri. Hi. I’m Peter.”

“Hello, Peter.” Shuri nods at the gauntlet. “I’ll take that from here.”

Peter hands her the gauntlet, casting a fearful look at Thanos’s forces, regrouping in the distance, between them and the quantum tunnel.

“How are you going to get it through all that?” he asks.

“_Don’t worry. She’s got help._”

* * *

As incredible as the Dora Milaje are, Shuri has never had an honor guard quite like this.

Okoye, Natasha, Wanda, and Mantis flank her on the ground. Valkyrie and Pepper’s drone protect either side from the air, and above them all soars Carol Danvers, facing the odds without fear, without hesitation, only determination.

Together they run, they fly, they fight. They clear a path for Shuri and the gauntlet.

In the van, Hope hits a final switch, and she and Scott shrink out of harm’s way as the quantum tunnel whirs to life.

Shuri is mere feet from the van when Thanos’s weapon slices through it.

The quantum tunnel explodes.

Shuri is thrown by the blast.

* * *

Shuri lies prone on the ground at the base of a teetering pile of metal and rock. She can’t tell where the gauntlet is, but it can’t have fallen too far away. She tries to sit up – which should be easy, but it isn’t.

She can’t move her arms. She can’t move any part of her body, other than her face. That can’t be good.

She doesn’t really feel any pain, either, which also can’t be good.

Crap.

* * *

Across the battlefield, T’Challa sees Thanos take a step towards his sister. He breaks free of the Outriders and sprints towards her. But he’s too far away.

Above the battlefield, Carol’s eyes snap first to Shuri, and then to the dropped gauntlet. She’s fast. But there’s a lot more riding on this moment than the life of one incredible human.

Far away from the battlefield, Tony furiously sends commands to his drone. “Get the stones! Get the kid! Come on, teen genius, get up!” But there’s too much to fight, too much to fend off, too much in the way.

None of them get there quickly enough.

But Nebula does.

Nebula emerges from the chaos and rubble, blood gushing from her head and an expression of pure rage on her face, running faster than she ever has in her life. She grabs the first weapon she passes – it practically leaps from the ground into her hand as she leaps over Shuri and closes the remaining distance to Thanos in two strides – and she slams Mjolnir into his shoulder, and into his chest, and into his face, and into his face, and into his face. He has no time to parry, let alone strike back. All he can do is step backwards once, and twice, and three times as she attacks him again, and again, and again.

And this should be the moment she’s been waiting for, the moment where she tears him apart, where she makes him suffer, where he finally comes to know the pain and hatred and fear he gave her.

But she can’t be slow. She can’t focus on torturing him or giving him any time to think about why this is happening. Because all Nebula can think, right now, is _not her, not her, not her._

Above Shuri, a large chunk of metal foundation creaks ominously, sliding a few inches along the top of the pile, teetering towards her.

She tries again to move. She can’t.

“Nebula,” she croaks. Too quiet.

She swallows – now _that _hurts, that’s probably a good sign – and tries again.

“Nebula, help me.”

And Nebula stops. She turns away from her dazed father. She drops the hammer, so she has both hands free as she runs back towards Shuri, climbs up the pile of rubble, and shoves the danger away.

Thanos wipes a hand across his face. It comes away bloody, but not fatally so.

He chuckles.

Nebula kneels at Shuri’s side, putting one hand on the other side of her torso.

“I’m sorry,” Shuri whispers to her. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” says Nebula.

T’Challa comes over one last outcrop. He doesn’t know who this blue woman is. But she’s crouched over his sister like a cat over an injured kitten. So he steps forward to stand between both of them and Thanos, taking a defensive stance.

Thanos ignores him.

“Even in the future, daughter,” he says, shaking his head, “after all you’ve been through, you’re still unable to kill me. I thought I raised you better than to let compassion get in the way of what you must do.”

He lifts his fist. “You should have finished me off when you had the chance.”

“I’d rather you be alive to see this,” another voice rings out, clear and stern.

Thanos turns. Carol Danvers stands a few yards away, the gauntlet on her hand and the power of the Infinity Stones coursing through her.

“Who –” says Thanos.

Carol snaps her fingers.

* * *

Steve and Bucky fight with their backs pressed against each other. Bucky ran out of ammunition a while ago; the vibranium fist and shield are the only weapons left, but if this is the end of the line, they’re facing it together.

And then the onslaught stops, their foes turning to dust and blowing away.

All across the battlefield, combat comes to a halt. Creatures, soldiers, war machines – everything Thanos brought to Earth, all his forces of destruction, are fading away.

Shock turns to relief, and relief into joy, and joy into cheers, cheers that echo across the landscape as the clouds finally part, allowing the sun to shine through.

Thanos sits on the ground, silent with shock as he too crumbles into the wind.

* * *

The fighter jet finds a place to land, kicking up the invaders’ dust as it touches down. The top opens, and Monica Rambeau hits the ground running.

“Aunt Carol!” she shouts, racing towards the woman on the ground. “Aunt Carol?”

Carol Danvers is pale and limp. But the ghost of a smile traces her lips. “Hey, Lieutenant Trouble.”

A relieved sob escapes Monica’s throat. “It’s Captain Trouble, now,” she says. “Are you – are you alright?”

“I’m not dead… Which means that’s still a mystery for the future.” Carol tries to make a fist, but her fingers are too weak to even twitch, let alone crackle with power. “I might need a lift home.”

“I can arrange that,” Monica says.

* * *

There’s nothing left of the lab, but a tent is quickly set up to shelter the wounded and guide any medical professionals present to those who need their aid. At the center of the tent, the gauntlet rests on a table, guarded and studied by Banner.

“The Reality Stone’s gone,” he says, turning the gauntlet over to check underneath it. “Maybe it fell out somewhere.”

“Something tells me we don’t have to worry about that one,” says Nebula, who’s been putting the pieces together in her head for a while now. Not all the blood on her clothing is her own.

For now, her attention is drawn to Shuri, strapped down to a stretcher and kicking up as much of a fuss as she can despite not being able to move.

T’Challa, Okoye, and Nakia are all at her side already. “We’re sending you home, Shuri,” her brother is saying. “You’ll have better help there than here.”

“No, I can’t leave yet!” Shuri insists. “I still have work to do here.”

“You’re not thinking straight,” says Nebula, joining them around the stretcher. Okoye glares at her, because it’s her job, but she agrees with the alien’s bluntness.

“The work will be able to continue without you at the helm,” Okoye explains to her princess. “The team here knows how to rebuild the quantum tunnel. They will return the stones.”

“I know you want to do more,” Nakia adds soothingly, “but you have to take care of yourself first. Look at how much you’ve done! You’ve brought everyone back.”

“Not everyone,” says Shuri. “Not yet. What about Vision? And Clint? And your sister, Nebula, what about Gamora?”

Nebula puts her hand on top of Shuri’s, hoping she can feel it. “It’s alright, Shuri. It’s alright. I accept it.”

“I don’t! I don’t accept it! There has to be a way! This isn’t right, it isn’t fair!”

Shuri is crying, and Nebula can’t stand there and watch Shuri cry, because then she will begin to cry, so she turns and stalks away across the tent with an expression on her face that everyone else will mistake for disgust.

Loki watches all this from a distance, standing with his brother as they supervise the injured, victorious Asgardians. He shakes his head.

“That little girl’s annoying message of hope has been playing non-stop everywhere I’ve turned on this planet for the last six months,” he says. “That human tenacity and optimism… It is _disgustingly _inspiring.”

Loki walks up to Banner who, out of habit, puts himself between the trickster god and the stones.

“Please hold off on smashing me into the ground long enough for me to explain the following sentence,” says Loki.

“I have an idea.”

* * *

The word “blip” is an internet meme at first, but soon humans of all generations are using it to refer to the six-month disappearance of half the universe’s lifeforms. It’s easier to cope when you can shove six months of shock, fear, and uncertainty into a four-letter word that sounds like comic book onomatopoeia.

But trauma is trauma, and if the psychologists of the world were busy before, they’re even busier now. Those who were “displaced” need help navigating a world which reacted – however briefly – to their death.

It’s difficult to live in a world that has moved beyond your expectations. But move it does, ever forward.

Hank Pym shakes his head at the bustling lab around him, muttering something about his research ending up in the hands of “Stark’s people.”

But no one pays his grumbling any mind, and he does help rebuild the quantum tunnel. The future is more at stake here than the past.

Though a few more trips to the past are, of course, necessary.

* * *

Rhodes is first to leave, and first to return, the Power Stone left in the vault on Morag for Star-Lord to find.

“So am I done with space travel now?” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool and all, but… I need a break.”

* * *

Valkyrie places the Space Stone back in Loki’s open, waiting hand.

“That was five seconds,” says Loki.

Valkyrie rolls her eyes. “So fucking sue me.”

* * *

The Ancient One takes the Time Stone back from Thor, storing it in the Eye of Agamotto once more.

“It would seem you are ‘those heroes out there’ after all,” she says.

“Oh, we’re a lot more than that,” Thor says. He tosses Mjolnir in the air once, then twice. On the third toss, the hammer is snatched away, soaring across New York towards his younger self’s waiting hand.

Thor watches it disappear into the distance. “And we’ve found even more heroes than before to take up the mantle.”

* * *

If Red Skull is surprised by who appears in front of him, casually tossing the Soul Stone up and down with one hand, he’s too taciturn to show it.

“Let me run a few things by you,” Loki says, “because to be honest, I’m having a difficult time making sense of all the rules.

“Of course, the Infinity Stones aren’t _supposed _to make sense; that’s the whole point. They’re aspects of the universe, byproducts of creation, they came from nothing in the same trillion-to-one explosion that created life itself. You can’t make _sense _of that, you can’t replicate it in a lab, that silly little genius was never going to pull it off no matter how many people she inspired. You can’t win when there aren’t any rules.

“And what even _are _rules, hm?” Loki’s enjoying himself, he’s had to lie low for so long, and he finally has an audience. “Rules and laws – they’re what we impose upon a world that makes no sense. We define the rules. Gravity’s only a limiting factor until you reach escape velocity, and then, well – what does it matter, really? Humans love making rules, that’s why they’re so easy to trick. Once they’ve decided that something is impossible, you could do it right in front of them and they just won’t see.

“But at the other end, once they’ve decided that something is important – oof, that’s where things get tricky.”

He holds the stone between his fingers, studying it.

“Humans place so much importance on love,” he says. “But it’s just an emotion. You could burn the world down for love, sure, but you could do so for greed, or rage, or depression. I burnt down a world once for mirth – don’t tell my brother. The point is, the emotion behind the action doesn’t matter. In the end, you have a world of ashes.”

His eyes shift to Red Skull’s face.

“That’s why that fool Clint Barton was able to sacrifice _himself_, now wasn’t it?” he says. “You ask those who come here for an everlasting exchange, a soul for a soul, but Romanoff didn’t exchange him for the Soul Stone. Barton threw himself off the cliff. Just like Thanos threw his daughter off the cliff. That’s what matters, isn’t it? Not the love, if it even actually existed, because that’s debatable in both cases; from what I’ve heard Barton wasn’t feeling much self-love at the moment. And not the death, either. Humans place too much importance on death, too; it’s not _that _permanent a state. No, the only thing that matters here is the _intent._ The intent to sacrifice _someone, _even yourself.”

Red Skull confirms nothing and denies nothing.

“In a brief time,” he says instead, “Thanos will be here to attempt to claim the Soul Stone.”

“Hard for him to do when it isn’t actually… well, wherever you keep it. Does that robe have pockets?”

“It is a very brief time.”

“Then let’s not waste it.” Loki closes his fist around the stone. “I’m here to make an exchange. And before you tell me it’s impossible, I want you to first think about what we’ve learned about rules today, and second, to think about who _I _am, and how much I don’t care about maintaining _anything _in the universe, let alone its timeline.”

* * *

“So, uh,” says Clint, “I may have missed a few things, but why are we hiding behind this rock?”

“Because this rock is positioned an appropriate distance down the slope without being too far away, and it conceals us quite nicely from the top of the cliff.”

“I mean why are we still here on Vormir,” says Clint. “And, probably more important, why are _you _here at all?”

“We have another errand to run,” says Loki. “And as for me, I don’t know, if anyone asks, you can tell them I was trying to atone for the past, or something, whatever it is you tragic hero types like to say.”

* * *

Loki is just as good at faking other people’s deaths as he is his own. Clint is good at climbing walls and catching people.

Thanos contributes the intent to sacrifice. He’ll never know what really happened to his daughter. He doesn’t need to.

* * *

Three people appear in the lab where one person left before, and the room goes _wild._

“No, please,” Loki says, doing a very bad job of looking like he doesn’t want the applause.

Natasha climbs up onto the platform, giving Clint a hug that’s long overdue no matter whose timeframe you’re using.

“Come on,” she says as she pulls away again. “I’ll fill you two in. We’ll have your families on the line in a moment.”

Clint is emotional beyond words. Gamora, on the other hand, seems puzzled – perhaps a side effect of very suddenly transitioning from thinking she’s about to be murdered to being somewhere else, somewhen else, surrounded by strangers.

“My family?” she says.

Natasha smirks. “It took a while – those Guardian friends of yours are terrible at keeping in touch. But I know someone your sister talks to.”

“…my sister _talks _to someone?!”

As Gamora and Clint follow Natasha away, Loki gives the wristband quantum device back to Banner. “Unless you think I’m going to take the Mind Stone back, too.”

“Oh, we’re not sending that one back yet,” says Banner.

“Playing it risky, then?”

“Let’s just say you’re not the only one who has an idea.”

Loki shakes his head. “I’ll leave you to it. I’ve done enough good deeds for a lifetime, and the universe awaits…”

* * *

Rocket’s forehead rests against the clear front of the display case. “I’m sorry, Groot,” he says.

“…I am Groot?”

Rocket whirls around. And there, stepping out of the shadows, is a teenage tree.

There are a million things Rocket could say in this moment. What comes out is, “Jeez, kid, you look even stupider than any of us in that jumpsuit.”

Groot opens the display case, and Rocket climbs up onto his shoulder.

“Hey, I think you’ve grown a bit,” he says, glancing at the ground. “I don’t suppose enough time has passed for you to miss me.”

Groot reaches up and hands him a new wristband device. “We are Groot.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t get mushy on me.” Rocket wipes a hand across his eyes. “Alright, let’s blow this joint.”

* * *

Clint retires, and it seems like it might stick this time. Maybe.

* * *

Steve retires. He and Bucky pull their baseball caps down over their eyes in airports and museums and take them off again on mountaintops and beaches. Their travels together are nearly a hundred years overdue, and they enjoy every minute of it, even when they get lost.

It’s impossible to get in contact with them. Actually, it might just be impossible for _Nick Fury_ to get in contact with them. Fortunately, Steve bequeathed the Captain America title to Sam before he wandered off to “god knows where” as Fury puts it, so at least someone from the old crowd of heroes is still reliably active.

All the same, every now and then Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes stumble across a situation going south, and they do something about it. It’s just the way they are.

* * *

Natasha almost retires. She takes some time away from the Avengers Compound. A lot of that time she spends in Clint’s backyard, teaching Lila Barton all the tricks her father doesn’t know.

She’s in the middle of one of these lessons when it hits her. The world needs heroes, and she’s finally begun to almost consider herself one – it’s easier to do so when there’s an idealistic teenager with a determined look on her face eating up her every word as though she has something valuable to pass on. What the world really needs, though, are heroes who haven’t begun to hate themselves yet. And those heroes need someone there to tell them that choices aren’t always easy, that being good is an active thing, and that it’s okay to feel like you aren’t living up to the hero you should be – as long as you get up again and keep working at being better.

That night, Natasha starts a note on her phone, a list of names. Heroes and contacts. Women she’s fought alongside, and those she’s always wanted to meet, and those who are just rumors, just starting out, those who are the most in need of a team.

At the top of the note, she types: _A-Force (come up with better name later)_

* * *

Shuri’s wheelchair curves around the lab table at top speed, coming to a stop near the window. She had to have her lab expanded to make room for her to move around, especially since every time she upgrades her mobility aid, she just makes the chair _faster_; she’s discovered her inner speed-demon since the Battle of Earth.

As a bonus, the wider room supports the increased number of inhabitants. The days in which Shuri stood alone in her lab are very much a thing of the past, at least until the current project is finished – though she can’t really imagine working alone anymore, even if she was very good at it.

“And – there.” Tony Stark steps back from the table. “Synapses are online and working.”

“Collectively,” Banner says, nudging Shuri’s shoulder with his massive elbow. “Not non-sequentially.”

Shuri grins. “Exactly.”

And “collectively” is exactly the word for what’s going on here. The three of them have been in the lab for the last week. Peter’s ducked in and out as well, sometimes helping with the project, while at other times serving as a side project. For the moment, he’s off trying out Shuri and Stark’s latest upgrades to his suit.

Shuri presses a few buttons on the arm of her chair, and the view of the vibranium mines is replaced by a live feed to a training room downstairs – one of the ones they keep reserved for testing out special technologies. A tag-team sparring match is underway, with Nebula and Peter currently circling each other while Okoye and Gamora stand ready on the sidelines.

Nebula glances towards the camera.

A message alert pings in Shuri’s ear, and words only she can see scroll across her vision: _Don’t distract me._

Shuri smirks. Once it had become clear that she’d need some cybernetic enhancements to assist her spinal repair, she hadn’t been able to resist working some of what she’d learned from Nebula’s tech into her schematics. Theirs is a closed circuit, but a powerful one – no matter where the _Benatar _is in the galaxy, they each have someone to talk to when they need it.

“I know you all are very busy,” Pepper says as she steps into the room, infant in arms, “but it’s Daddy’s turn to hold Morgan. Mommy needs a nap.”

“There they are – both my incredible girls!” Tony kisses Pepper as he scoops Morgan out of her arms. “Our patient needs to spend some time rebooting anyway. Time for some quality father-daughter bonding…”

* * *

The current crowd is pushing the limits of Shuri’s lab, not to mention the limits of her introversion. But it _is _a birthday party of sorts. Scott’s already joked twice that he should have brought a cake, the first time because he thought it was funny, while the second time was likely due to some leftover nerves from transporting the quantum tunnel across the Atlantic.

Shuri’s nervous, too, even though this time she has the time she needs to do the job right, and an international network of heroes and scientists who have supported her for almost a year now, and the confidence boost of doing impossible things with increasing frequency in that same timespan. She’s nervous because it’s impossible not to think about failure when many of the parts used to create the figure on the table in front of her were parts salvaged from the Battle of Wakanda. They’d decided to use them, instead of making him completely new, in the hope that his memories and personality would transfer.

Bruce and Tony are watching her progress from the other side of the lab table. Scott and Hope are manning the quantum tunnel. Pepper is standing in the doorway holding Morgan, while Cassie Lang sits at her feet, doing her best to be as little of a distraction as a child really ever can be. Okoye stands just outside the door, where a loyal guard should be. Wanda sits off to the side, her hands folded in front of her and her face purposefully neutral. Nebula’s face is always neutral, but she has a hand on the back of Shuri’s chair, and touching Shuri’s wheelchair is not something just anyone at any time is allowed to do.

With a little _click, _the Mind Stone comes free of Vision’s head.

“Alright.” Shuri takes the stone into her palm and backs away from the table. “Powering up.”

Bruce had hypothesized before that there was more to Vision than the stone, that removing it in just the right way would not leave him a lifeless machine. Still, Shuri keeps the stone in her hand while Wanda steps up to the table.

“Vizh?” she says.

The android flexes his fingers, turns his head, and sits up.

“Vision,” Wanda says again.

“Yes,” says Vision. “Yes, that sounds right. That’s me, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” Wanda grabs his hand, and another wave of relief washes over her as the metal fingers grip hers in return. “Yes, that’s you!”

Shuri hands the Mind Stone to Scott. He disappears and reappears, and the stone is gone, all the Infinity Stones are finally gone.

“When do _I _get to go time-traveling?” Cassie pipes up from the doorway.

“You don’t,” Scott and Hope say in unison as they shut off the quantum tunnel.

Shuri reaches up towards her shoulder. Nebula steps forward and puts her hand in Shuri’s.

And there’s still so much work to do, there always will be. They have so many plans. Now that there are, for once, no megalomaniacs sending armies across the universe, the heroes of the universe can devote their time to a different kind of saving the world.

There _are _enough resources to go around. The problem was never scarcity, but distribution. Shuri knows this; Wakanda had just begun the work of sharing the wealth when Thanos interrupted it. And even those heroes who don’t care about fixing poverty, who have never known a life where it seemed like there wasn’t enough to go around, care about creating a universe where no Thanos will ever exist again. A universe where everyone is too comfortable and cared for to listen to the seductive reasoning of genocide.

It won’t be easy to create and maintain that universe. It will take a hell of a lot of work.

But for now – in this moment – for the first time in a long time – Shuri can exhale.

“I think I know you,” Vision is saying. “Or, that I should know you. Do I know who you are?”

Wanda is blinking away tears. “You will.”

* * *

Carol’s eyes are on the horizon. It’s a sunset, here. But the colors in the sky could be a sunrise on a number of worlds, and noontime on others. So many suns, in so many skies, shining on so many families reunited after the blip. Families on Earth and Xandar and Terma. A family running around a yard on the Skrull Homeland, children and grandfather restored, happy, safe.

A hand covers her own, reminding Carol that she isn’t alone on the porch.

“I know that face,” Maria says. “What are you thinking about?”

“The universe,” says Carol. “All the people who’ve needed me. Who probably still need me.”

“Nobody’s putting any pressure or blame on you for being grounded. Nobody except you.”

_Grounded _is putting it lightly. Carol can hardly manage to move from one chair to another without assistance, even this long after the second snap.

“I know,” she says. “Old habits die hard, that’s all.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Carol looks at Maria. Her hair is white, her skin wrinkled. And she is every bit Carol’s Maria, and the smile on Maria’s face tells Carol that, to Maria’s eyes, she is still every bit Maria’s Carol. It’s enough to make Carol feel a pang of shame whenever she remembers how she ran away from this. But the pang is easily soothed, whenever Maria smiles, which is often, when she looks at Carol.

“I should be happy,” Carol says.

Maria tilts her head to the side. “Aren’t you?”

“I am. A lot of the time. But I could be happier. We won. I should be happier.”

“I don’t think so,” says Maria. “I’ve never imagined you retiring, you know that? It’s just not who you are. So there’s no reason for you to expect yourself to be completely happy with how things turned out. I don’t expect that of you, as happy as I am to have you here.”

“I _am _happy to be here,” Carol says.

“You don’t have to be.”

“I know I don’t have to be! But I am. I’m happy. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry it took me so long to come back.”

Maria smiles as she squeezes Carol’s hand.

“You’re here now,” she says. “That’s good enough for me."


End file.
